Group consensus in multi-agent systems with switching topologies and communication delays

Group consensus problems in networks of dynamic agents are addressed for two cases: (i) communication topologies are switching and the switching occurs among finite topologies arbitrarily; (ii) communication topologies are switching and the switching occurs among finite topologies arbitrarily, and there exist communication delays. We introduce double-tree-form transformations under which dynamic equations of agents are transformed into reduced-order systems. Based on the reduced-order systems, we obtain some analysis results for the two cases. In addition, we further investigate multi-group consensus as an extension of the group consensus, and present some analysis results by similar techniques. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.